The first disc has calibration patterns and demos. Like S&M HD Benchmark, I've scanned the demo reel. It's comprised of scenes from Pixar and Disney films and is encoded at a higher ABR than the films' actual releases so may make for an interesting comparison.

There's a folder at the disc root called ROM_DATA_WOW_ENCODER_TEST with 599 TIFFs at 1920x1080, and a reference high bitrate AVC encode to compare is found via the disc menus under Video Encoder Stress Test. Amazingly, the back cover actually advertises this, as "Face off with the Pros"!

Subtitles are unnecessary, as there are no spoken words in this film. It was Kazakhstan's official entry for Best Foreign Film at the 82nd Academy Awards, and made it to the nine-film short list from the 65 original entries. This is the only edition of the film I can find worldwide.

The disc is currently available on a lengthy 2-4 week delay from Amazon.fr, and it is possible that it has only a small print run. I would urge interested parties to order this Blu-ray ASAP, as I have a suspicion that low demand may cause it to go out-of-print.

Some time back Cinema Squid posted a link to a number of frame grabs he extracted from the US version of The Book of Eli. This was released by Warner Bros in the US and featured a ~17Mbps VC1 encode. I have now extracted matching frames from the Australian version (Sony, MPEG4 AVC, ~25Mbps) and set up a test by which you can try to work out which is which.

Significantly different from the UK release from Fox Pathé. Beyond the 7.1 track and a smattering of additional extra features on the U.S. Magnolia release, there is also a quite noticeable gamma/brightness difference between the two.

I'll post up a full set of U.S. matches to my current UK shots after they come out of the cooker (probably tomorrow). It might also be worth noting that the playlist below addresses a short offset into the main M2TS which actually physically starts off with an interesting bit of preroll transfer/authoring info:

I'll jump the gun here and let everyone know that msgohan, aka 'screencap addict', correctly identified all ten of the screen shots. To me they were pretty much indistinguishable.

When msgohan says something about a capture, I say believe him!

Wow, that's pretty impressive!

Just quickly eyeballing them, shot sets #6 and #10 are the only ones that immediately stand out for me as having a noticeable visual difference - as perhaps best seen in the subtle color differences of Denzel's face in #6 and the differing shadow definition around Mila's nostril in #10. All in all, however, they seem very, very similar to me.

Definitely an interesting comparison and it's reassuring for me to see such similarity due to my wacky homebrew method of extracting frames.

Although I did just notice that there is a certain file size difference between the two of the pair - even after an attempt to recompress them - implying that one of the pair might always contain more information than the other. I know that all of my frames are I-frames, but they might always be the smaller one of the pair if the trend holds from my cheating and comparing against my own copies of #6 and #10. I await the answer key...